The New Milwaukee Consort
Vintage sounds. Stories that resonate.
About The New Milwaukee Consort
The New Milwaukee Consort is dedicated to the music of the European Renaissance and Baroque, crafting intimate performances around words and music whose stories resonate across the centuries. They particularly relish bringing lesser known sounds of the 17th century to modern audiences, from the work of women composers such as Barbara Strozzi to music from handwritten manuscripts documenting the early development of the cello and ongoing experimentation on the lute. Since its inception in 2019, the New Milwaukee Consort has shared its music with audiences through the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, Early Music Now, the Alliance Française of Milwaukee, Madison’s LunArt Festival, Spring Green’s Rural Musicians’ Forum, Grace Evangelical Lutheran’s First Friday Series, United Methodist Church of Whitefish Bay, and Wauwatosa’s Trinity Episcopal Church. The New Milwaukee Consort is based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Tim Sterner Miller is a musicologist whose lifelong fascination with instruments has led him to explore technologies and traditions from across history and the globe. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s degree in the history of musical instruments from the National Music Museum at the University of South Dakota. As a Senior Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he teaches courses in musicology and ethnomusicology and directs the UWM Collegium Musicum. His scholarship on the pedal steel guitar and its makers and players has been published in the Grove Dictionary of American Music and the Oxford Handbook of Country Music. As a musician, he has performed in a wide variety of contexts, from symphony orchestras to baroque operas to jazz, country, and rock bands. He currently plays in the Milwaukee area on lute, viol, mandocello, and pedal steel.
Kristin Knutson Berka is a versatile soprano praised for her “sparkling, fluid soprano with admirable flexibility” (Opera News). Her repertoire spans the genres of opera, oratorio, and musical theatre with a special commitment to the field of Early Music. She has recently appeared with the Sheboygan Symphony as the soprano soloist in Handel’s Messiah, with Haymarket Opera as Daniele in Stradella’s Susanna and Drusilla in L’Incoronazione di Poppea, and in concert with the Wisconsin Baroque Ensemble. Upcoming engagements include La decollazione di San Giovanni Battista with Haymarket and a concert of arias by J.S. Bach during the Milwaukee Symphony’s Bach Festival. Additional past engagements feature Madison’s Just Bach concert series, Brew City Opera, IndyBaroque Chamber Players, Florentine Opera, Skylight Theatre, Alchemy Viols, Great Lakes Baroque with harpsichordist Jory Vinikour, and the Fireside Theatre. She is proud to be a co-founding member of The New Milwaukee Consort.
Charlie Rasmussen is a cello faculty member and string department co-chair at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music in Milwaukee. He performs historical cello and viola da gamba with the Wisconsin Baroque Ensemble and the New Milwaukee Consort. He is the Instrumental Co-Director at Just Bach. Mr. Rasmussen has recorded Tommaso Giordani's Cello Duos (Centaur Records, 2020) and 11 Capricci by Joseph Dall'Abaco (Centaur Records, 2018). He has been on faculty at the Madison Early Music Festival and currently teaches viol at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He also serves on the board of directors of Early Music Now.